The real 'War on Women' is called the Pill

How many more articles have to circulate condemning the side effects of the birth control pill before feminists, reproductive health agencies, and the Obama administration take note? When is enough enough?

The latest report out of Germany states that women who take the birth control pill may actually be ingesting chemicals that make their bodies more hospitable to staph bacteria. What does that mean? In simple terms, it means that the pill can be a factor in the possibility of harboring staph in nasal passages. If so, these women will become sick from an infection at a higher rate than non-pill users.

So where is the media, always concerned as they are about the phony war on women? We have heard no alarms emanating from their ranks, nor are we likely to hear them.

Further, we have seen no public request that further studies be done to confirm these findings. Perhaps the problem is not so much that the pill may cause health problems for women as it is that the birth control pill is extremely lucrative for those entities like Planned Parenthood that specialize in marketing sex without consequences.

It should be noted that the pattern for not informing women about the negative health aspects of the pill goes back decades. For example, most women do not even realize that their birth control choice can actually cause an embryo to die before it has a chance to implant, thus causing a very early abortion.

The purveyors of the pill get around this by misinforming women that the pregnancy they may experience would not begin until the embryo can be detected. By using such false rhetoric the providers of the pill do not need to worry about telling the truth—that an embryo begins eight days before he can positively be detected. The test is available to detect the preborn child earlier, but who is worried about making sure the female knows this?

Such practices are deceptive, to be sure, but if it hasn’t caused a problem in more than 40 years, why bother to start telling the truth now?

The problem is not so much that the pill is bad medicine as it is that the culture has grown comfortable with the idea that a birth control pill protects against pregnancy even if it means women suffer illness, infection, blood clots, and sometimes death. There’s always a price to pay for convenience, isn’t there?

Those who insist that somebody is waging a war on women need to take a time out and look in the mirror. Honesty would be nice.

Judie Brown is the president of American Life League — the nation’s oldest Catholic pro-life education and advocacy group, a three-time appointee to the Pontifical Academy for Life (twice by Pope John Paul II and once by Pope Benedict XVI), a prolific author on the Catholic Church, and a leading voice in the pro-life movement.